


A Burden as Well as an Honour

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Frontier Wolf - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Biting, Dominance, Hair-pulling, M/M, Marking, Post-Canon, Role Reversal, Submission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 18:58:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1047435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Though no-one was about for at least a mile, Hilarion said in a soft voice that would not carry as much as a foot beyond where he and Alexios lay, “Command is a burden as well as an honour. There is a sweetness in yielding it up for a little while, is there not?”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Burden as Well as an Honour

Hilarion lay in the damp reeds on the river-bank, eyes closed, arms flung wide about him and knees drawn up slightly. Under the fawn-brown freckles that covered him from top to toe, his water-beaded skin glowed as white as the moon.

“Do you not fear the sun will burn you?” Alexios asked, lying just as naked beside him.

Hilarion laughed, lazily and without care. “Let it, sir. After the winter past I would happily jump into a furnace if it would keep me warm through the next. Aye me, I had thought nowhere could be colder than Caledonia in winter.”

They had been lucky in their choice of a day to themselves. It had dawned clear and bright, promising the perfect sort of heat to swell the grapes on the terraced hillsides. As Hilarion had said, the winter had been punishingly cold. Gallia Belgica was not as damp as the north of Britannia, thankfully, and Castra Cugerna kept out the draughts better than Castellum had. But, after months of shivering hard enough to grind one’s bones together under skin made raw and red wherever the wind touched it, none of them could thank his gods enough for the sweet-smelling green spring. Midsummer was coming on now, and while some of the Attacotti complained of the heat, neither Alexios nor Hilarion minded it.

They had ridden southwest, following the Mosella away from the Rhenus, trailed by a pair of hounds lent them by a hunter in the _canabae_ that encircled the foot of the camp. The daughter river, unlike its fast-flowing and chill-watered mother, wound steadily but more slowly through woods of beech and box, oak and elm, loud with the trills of larks, the chirrs of nuthatches, and the shrilling of waxwings. The bitch-hound had ably flushed a fine fat capercaillie hen, chuffing and whirring, out from cover. With a few handfuls of fresh-picked blackberries the bird made a plentiful meal for two men used to hard living; its entrails, a treat for the hounds.

Sitting by the cookfire had been a trial. Hunting in the heat had left them sweating profusely; the flames made the sweat course down their faces into their eyes. The smitch rose into the hot still air, then settled thickly into their noses and throats. Between all this and the hen’s grease on their faces and fingers, it was very much to the good that they had brought oil and strigils with them. They doused the fire and returned to the river-bank, where the trees fell away; they tethered the horses anew in the shade, and they freed the hounds to roam and hunt as they would. 

Quickly and with an economy of movement, Hilarion unlaced and stepped out of his boots, then pulled off his tunic and short braccae and dropped them beside the boots. Naked, flashing in the sun like a trout, he leapt from the bank into the Mosella with a great splash, sending up a corona of water about him. A breath later, his sandy head surfaced, and he shook droplets from it.

“Is the water warm, Hilarion?” Alexios called out.

“Not quite a calidarium, sir, but it will do.” Hilarion grinned of a sudden. “Join me!”

Alexios’s heart began to beat harder as he drew his own tunic over his head. He told himself that neither of them would see anything he had not seen a thousand times before, in the baths, in other rivers, in the latrines. Soon his clothes and boots lay in the reeds alongside Hilarion’s and his bare feet stood on the sun-warmed dirt, and he arched forward and dived into the river.

The water was cool enough to refresh, mild enough not to chill. Alexios swam the distance to the opposite bank, then back again. Hilarion, floating on his back, eyed him with one tawny brow arched.

When Alexios reached the shallows on the near side, he stood, water streaming from his shoulders and chest. Hilarion lifted his other brow. His light-blue eyes seemed oddly dark, especially in the bright sun glinting off the water.

“A commendable display of energy on your day off, sir, and a warm day at that.”

Alexios grinned, though he took care not to let his eyes drift beneath Hilarion’s face. “I have not swum for pleasure in ages. Possibly not since before I became a soldier. Even in the summer I did not much fancy swimming in Caledonia.”

“Aye, sir, on a cool day you might have left much-needed bits of you in the loch.”

Alexios chuckled, though he could feel warmth rising in his cheeks. “Indeed. I would bid you to fetch the oil and the strigils, Centenarius, but I should not want to disturb your leisure.”

Hilarion’s mouth quirked. He righted himself in the shallows and levered himself by his arms up onto the bank, then rose to his feet, moving with the angular grace of a heron. Alexios watched the muscles play under the dappled skin of his back and arse as Hilarion strode to where the horses stood and rummaged in the saddle-bags.

In short order he turned about again and walked down to the bank. “Sir? Catch.” Alexios held up his hands and caught first one strigil, then the other, then the heavy vial. His hands empty, Hilarion leapt into the Mosella again, and Alexios ducked out of the spray.

They settled themselves on a broad stone whose warm flat surface rose slightly above that of the water. With his left hand, Alexios uncorked the vial, poured a measure of oil into his right palm, and handed both vial and cork to Hilarion. Purposefully not looking at his centenarius, Alexios worked the oil into his own face, throat, arms, and torso, then scraped briskly at these parts. Strigil in hand, he jumped back into the river and scraped himself anew to loose the dirtied oil into the water.

When Alexios regained his seat on the stone, Hilarion was glistening in the sunlight. His knees were drawn up, and his hands were between his thighs, half-concealed from Alexios’s gaze. Alexios swallowed, the sound lost in the gentle gurgling of the river and the cries of the birds.

“Are you done with the oil?” he asked. Hilarion nodded. His face seemed slightly pink, but then again he would have just finished scraping it, and the oil was quite warm.

Alexios arranged himself similarly, knees drawn up and apart, and picked up the vial once again. He gently worked the oil into his hips, legs, and feet before loosening it with the strigil. Then he slipped his slick hands between his own thighs.

He had done this before countless men, before Hilarion even, but never alone with him. With a deep and silent breath Alexios conjured images he had tried to suppress for most of a year: Connla hanging limp and bleeding from the stake on the dancing ground; the madwoman cradling her dead babe to her breast as she spat wild-eyed hatred at the men of the Third Ordo; the bright red life seeping out of Cunorix into the stark white snow. Bitter gall to pour into the cup of a sweet afternoon, but at least his cock now lay soft and quiescent against his thigh, even as he eased the prepuce back to oil the sensitive flesh beneath. It remained obedient to his will as he reached beneath it to work oil into the skin over his stones, then into the intimate crevice further down and back.

Finally he reached under himself and coated his buttocks with oil. In a smooth series of movements, he grasped the strigil just as he slid into the water once again. And he sent up a silent prayer to Mithras that, at this angle, even Hilarion’s sharp eyes would not penetrate more than a thumb’s breadth below the surface.

When he had scraped his lower body clean of oil, he looked up at the stone once more. Hilarion was not there.

“Sir?”

Alexios spun about. Hilarion stood in slightly deeper water, which rose to the midpoint of his belly. His eyes glinted, and the lazy smile was back on his lips.

“I do not suppose I could ask you to help me cleanse my back? I fear there are spots I cannot reach very well with the strigil, or at all with a handful of oil.”

Alexios blinked. “Certainly.”

Hilarion moved to the edge of the stone and turned about, crossing his arms atop it and lowering his head onto them. The bones of his back stood out in sharp relief under the well-freckled skin. Alexios took up the vial again, filled his palm with more oil, and smoothed it slowly from the nape of Hilarion’s neck downward. The contact with his centenarius’s warm smooth flesh sent a wave of heat through him, stronger than he would have anticipated, and his cock twitched in the tepid water.

He felt a slight tremour beneath his hand as he reached the small of Hilarion’s back. “Are you cold of a sudden?” he asked, laughing. “In _this_ weather?”

Hilarion turned his head to the side to speak. “I am… a bit sensitive, sir, that is all.” His voice was softer and huskier than usual.

Alexios frowned. Nowhere on Hilarion’s back did the skin seem sun-burnt or otherwise marred. “Will it pain you if I scrape there?”

“No, sir, I can tolerate it. If it is not cleansed I cannot imagine it would feel better.”

He lifted the strigil and drew it in short choppy strokes down Hilarion’s spine. For the most part he used the same pressure he would have used on any man’s back: firm enough to gather up the oil and not to tickle, light enough not to sting. When he reached the small of his centenarius’s back, he lightened his stroke, and he frowned to feel Hilarion shiver again at the touch of the implement.

“Done,” he said neutrally, replacing the strigil on the rock.

“Thank you, sir,” Hilarion said, his voice still quiet, and he moved further away from Alexios to submerge himself. It was Alexios’s turn to lean on the stone, and he exhaled sharply.

Hilarion’s head broke the surface of the water again, and he pushed wet sandy hair out of his eyes.

“Sir? Did you need…?” It was politely asked, with no mockery, not even the usual lazy smile.

“I am fine,” Alexios said, a shade more curtly than he had planned. “Thank you, Centenarius,” he added hastily, and he began to stride through the shallows toward the bank, strigil still in hand. “Bring the other one and the vial up with you, would you?”

“Yes, sir.”

When they were back in the reeds, Hilarion said, “If you do not mind, sir, I should like to simply stretch out on the bank.”

“I see no reason you should not,” Alexios said with a shrug. It was true enough. They were well fed, they were clean and cooled, and it was only mid-afternoon.

“Will you keep me company, sir?” Hilarion said. Alexios could not tell if his smile this time were mocking or not.

He thought for the briefest moment. The sight, the voice, even the thought of his centenarius lying naked beside his own naked form would be a test of his composure. On the other hand, there was nothing urgent for either of them to do just now, and he could not recall the last time he had simply luxuriated in the sun any more than he could the last time he had swum for enjoyment. To decline the offer would seem odd and churlish.

So he dropped into the reeds beside Hilarion, who was already extending his lanky frame in all directions and who set the vial and strigils by his side. Once on his back, Alexios put his arms behind his head and crossed his ankles.

Other than expression of his concern that Hilarion not burn himself to a cinder, there was little for him to say, but Hilarion seemed content to lie quiet and still beside him, absorbing as much sunlight as he could. Alexios imagined he would be wincing on the morrow during drills, but so long as his centenarius could still carry out his duties, it would be his misfortune and not his commander’s. Other than that his lovely skin might not be so lovely for a week or two…

He realised that Hilarion had been silent for a long while. Alexios darted a look at his face and saw that his pale lashes still brushed the skin below his eyes. 

He let his own eyes wander down Hilarion’s torso. Hard muscles covered the narrow frame of his chest; only the sparsest of hair grew there, and the nipples were flat and pale. On his likewise-hardened belly began a downward arrow of dark-gold hair, fine at first but thickening as it descended. His cock, of considerable size even at rest, curled against one well-muscled thigh. It looked as lazy as any other part of him so often affected to be. Alexios wondered whether this, too, were a deceptive laziness.

He let his gaze meander upward again — and a spike of fear took him to see the pale-blue eyes open, watching him watch Hilarion. And then came the familiar slow smile, but shaded with knowing, making Alexios’s belly clench with something quite distinct from fear.

“You are not so difficult to look upon yourself, sir.”

Alexios could not remember having blushed in years. He had not realised he was still capable of doing so.

The sly smile broadened. “We are quite a ways from camp, sir — and you know as well as I do that half the Attacotti are fucking the other half, when they think no Roman is watching. Shall we stop pretending we do not wish to do the same with one another?”

This time Alexios’s lips parted. Neither had he realised he could still be surprised by anything that came out of Hilarion’s mouth.

Hilarion, smiling yet, stretched out a slender hand and traced a fingertip lightly across Alexios’s lower lip. No-one had ever done that to him before, and the intimacy of the touch, the slightly tickling pleasurability, drew a soft moan from him. Under his freckles, Hilarion turned pink once more.

“You… may as well leave off the ‘sir,’ at least while we are here,” Alexios managed to get out.

“At your command, si—Alexios,” Hilarion said, eyes glinting even as they darkened again, and he pulled Alexios to him.

Alexios had been only with women since they had come to Belgica, women of the _canabae_. Soft, smooth, dabbed with oils redolent of spring flowers, pliant beneath him, asking no more of him than coin. Lovely women, skilled women, even kind women, in that they would listen to the troubles of his soul as well as relieve the needs of his body.

But there was no bond between him and any of them, nothing that would ever impel him to seek them out for more than physical relief. And it occurred to him, as he swept his palms up the long bony plane of Hilarion’s back, that it was too long since he had caressed solid muscle, let his fingers play in the down on another man’s arms, or felt the exhilarating scrape of another’s stubble against his own face.

Just as the lazy mien and ever-ready mockery concealed the fierce loyalty and deadliness of a Frontier Wolf, so did they apparently conceal the skills of an experienced and attentive lover. Hilarion’s tongue filled Alexios’s mouth, darting, sweeping, sliding along Alexios’s own, while the fingertips of his right hand played teasingly in Alexios’s scalp and along his nape before running lightly along his spine. The image of Hilarion putting his tongue to other uses flashed into Alexios’s head, and he found himself groaning against Hilarion’s mouth as his cock swelled harder between them and he could feel Hilarion’s in turn against his own thigh.

Another quiet laugh, low and dark. Of a sudden, earth and sky traded places. Alexios found himself flat on his back, hands like iron bands about his wrists, pinning them to the ground above his head. Hilarion knelt astride him, wetted lips slightly apart, dilated eyes moving insolently down Alexios’s body to the demanding jut of his cock, then back upward again to hold his gaze with a hint of challenge. Hilarion’s own cock evinced no more laziness, pressing hard into his belly.

A small, sharp voice at the back of his mind told Alexios that Hilarion presumed too much, even given leave to kiss him; that Alexios should not let him hold him down so. That voice drowned in the rush of blood thundering in Alexios’s ears and cascading its heat throughout his body.

Though no-one was about for at least a mile, Hilarion said in a soft voice that would not carry as much as a foot beyond where they lay, “I thought you might like that. Command is a burden as well as an honour. There is a sweetness in yielding it up for a little while, is there not?”

There had been a time, not very long ago, when such a remark would have reminded him of Abusina and he would have gone cold with defensiveness. Now, he wondered if he could come simply from lying beneath Hilarion, touched nowhere but his wrists, listening to his centenarius tell him things about himself he had not fully realised in a soft, lust-deepened voice with not a shade of its usual mockery.

Then Hilarion’s head dropped, and Alexios felt the sharpness of teeth in the flesh of his shoulder. He uttered something between a moan and a cry, the pain of the bite swallowed up in another flash of heat that shot outward from his cock through his belly and limbs.

Hilarion raised his head again, this time only slightly above Alexios’s, and whispered, “That will leave a pretty mark, aye? In your full uniform no-one will see it, in the baths you can jest that you were bitten by a ‘she-wolf,’ but you will know that a Wolf of a different sort left it there, and when you look upon it you will remember me holding you down and inflicting it.”

Alexios closed his eyes and groaned. “Oh, gods, Hilarion…”

Hilarion bent his head once more and licked a wet trail of pleasure from the bite up the side of Alexios’s neck. He ran his tongue round the outside of Alexios’s ear, finishing with a hard nip at the lobe. Alexios whimpered, a sound lost in another kiss, fierce and ravenous.

Hilarion released Alexios’s wrists to pull him close again. Alexios flung his own arms round Hilarion, and he found his hips working of their own volition, grinding hardness against hardness. Suppressing a groan in his throat, Hilarion pushed Alexios away and, grasping his wrists once more, held him at arms’ length.

“Oh, no,” he breathed, and there was a promise in the mocking smile that twisted inside Alexios like a dagger heated white. “Not so quickly as that.”

Alexios was panting; he took a deep breath to steady his voice, but it did not keep the tremour from it. “What would you do with me, Hilarion?”

The smile vanished for the briefest moment as Hilarion’s lips parted and his eyes seemed to blaze darkly. He regained it quickly, but it was softer now. He loosed Alexios’s left wrist that he might stroke gentle fingers down his commander’s olive-skinned cheek. When they reached Alexios’s lips, Alexios sucked the tips into his mouth and softly, gently, let them slide wetly out, enjoying how for a moment Hilarion forgot to smile again and looked dizzy enough to tumble into the river all the way from where they lay high on the bank.

“I believe you have answered your own question,” Hilarion said hoarsely. “If I sound like a failed harper, so be it, but I have eaten ripe strawberries that were not as soft and sweet as your mouth, Alexios. I suppose I need not tell you where I have imagined your mouth on me, any number of times?”

Alexios closed his eyes as the breath left him in one long huff.

“How would you like — do you wish to lie on your back?”

The note of mockery was back in Hilarion’s smile and voice. “I will stand. You shall kneel.”

Alexios flushed crimson. Not a few times, as he had slid an oiled hand up and down the length of his own cock, he had imagined taking Hilarion’s into his mouth. But he had always pictured Hilarion lying flat, writhing and gasping and moaning beneath him; himself, hovering above, in control despite being the servicer and not the serviced. He had never pictured himself kneeling to his centenarius. To imagine it unstrung his nerves somewhat, but it also set his cock to throbbing, low and dark, like a Dalriadan war-drum.

Hilarion released Alexios’s wrist and pushed himself up on his arms; he got his feet under him and, slowly, stood. Alexios drank in the beautiful unfolding of him, tall and slender and as spotted as a pard. There being nothing about them to lean on, he stood straight-spined, chin lifted, arms folded, feet planted apart, cock as erect as he himself. Looking down at Alexios with that infuriating smile, he demanded, “What do you wait for?”

Alexios smiled back up at him, concealing his nervousness. “May I not take a moment to admire you?”

“Did you not get your fill of that when you thought I was not looking?” But the colour had risen under Hilarion’s freckles again.

Still smiling, Alexios rose up on his knees. It felt strangely… good, to be on them before the man he had come to trust more than any other in the world, who had cared for him as tenderly as a mother might have when he lay feverish. He had nothing to fear from Hilarion. And even if his centenarius chose to take his mouth as roughly as he might take a whore’s, there was nothing to say that Alexios could not fondle and caress him.

He set his palms lightly against the outsides of Hilarion’s thighs, just above the knees, and slid them gently upward, barely brushing through the fine dark-gold hair, until they rested flat against his centenarius’s hips. This elicited a hissing inhalation. Encouraged, Alexios let one hand drop — but not so far as to where it had begun. When his fingers curled tightly round Hilarion’s cock, Hilarion’s breath hitched, then began to come faster.

Looking up, Alexios met Hilarion’s darkened eyes, and he made a show of wetting his lips, slowly and copiously. Then he leaned forward and slid them down over the blood-swollen cockhead, inhaling the scents of clean skin and calamus oil and reedy water and, lying beneath, the warm intimate musk of a man.

Hilarion gasped sharply. He lay a hand on either side of Alexios’s head, twining the thick dark hair round his lean long fingers. Alexios, slowly working the rigid length of flesh toward the back of his throat, feared for a moment that Hilarion would begin thrusting savagely in and out of his mouth. Hilarion did not, but he seemed to tremble with an effort to remain still.

At last Alexios had taken as much into his mouth and throat as he could. A few inches remained unsheathed, and this part he wrapped his left hand about, squeezing as gently as possible. He let his right hand wander, smoothing and stroking Hilarion’s arse, moving softly over the quivering flank, then inward to cup and caress the stones drawn hard and tight up against Hilarion’s body. His reward was a sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan.

He drew his head slowly backward, letting all but the tip of Hilarion’s cock slide out of his mouth. Wrapping both hands round the wet flesh he had just bared, he caught and held Hilarion’s gaze again as he let his tongue play gently on the little ridge on the underside of the head. Hilarion’s eyes closed and, this time, he moaned, a sound made of breathlessness and need and razor-like pleasure. It tore sharp and sweet through Alexios, and he himself moaned round Hilarion’s cock as he took it back into his mouth and throat, hands cupping Hilarion’s buttocks to draw him closer.

Hands fell upon his shoulders, pushing him backward, and Hilarion slipped from his mouth. He looked up, startled.

“You do that very well,” Hilarion said with more breath than voice. “But I had a reason for laying the oil to my side, rather than returning it to the saddle-bags.”

Alexios’s throat was of a sudden too tight for speaking. He closed his eyes, feeling his heart begin to pound again, and he turned his face into the warm narrow hand that cupped his right cheek, brushing his lips against the palm.

“Lie down for me, Alexios. On your belly.” As urgent as any command Alexios himself had ever given, but it made him imagine honey dripping from a comb in shimmering heat. He obeyed, stretching his arms out before him, palms and then entire body flat against the reeds. Then he crossed his arms and lay his head atop them, as Hilarion had done leaning against the stone.

Several seconds of abandonment, the sun lying hot on his back and arse and legs like another lover. Then the stir of motion through thin damp plants, and pale freckled knees beside him. Above him, the sound of shallow breath; nearby, the even softer sound of an object being laid down.

An open palm settled between his shoulder blades, then swept downward. Alexios shuddered as much from surprise as from excitement, then gasped as Hilarion’s touch lightened against the small of his back.

“Ah, it is the same for you, there,” came a whisper of revelation. Then it was not a hand but lips touching him there, and the wet delicate tip of a tongue circling round the deepest part of the hollow. Alexios turned his face downward against his forearm to stifle a short, sharp cry.

Warm, rough breath tickled the wetted patch of skin. Then Hilarion’s hand returned to Alexios. At first it glided lightly over each buttock, making him squirm; then the touch grew firmer, from smoothing to rubbing to cupping and pressing to fingernails digging in. Alexios arched his back and splayed his thighs, pushing his buttocks into Hilarion’s palm.

Hilarion’s other hand fell upon the small of Alexios’s back and pushed him down flat. Alexios whimpered in frustration against his own forearm, a sound met with a hoarse, mocking chuckle. “I thought you had chosen to let me do as I would with you?” With his right hand Hilarion continued to fondle Alexios’s buttocks, occasionally dipping down to caress his inner thighs and the underside of his stones. “What if I choose to hold you down like this all the rest of the day, only to play with your beautiful arse and listen to you whine like one of the hounds?”

“Did you keep the oil by your side simply that you could massage my arse all the rest of the day?” Alexios gasped. “I suspect not.”

“An observant man, is my ducenarius.”

Of a sudden he was bereft of Hilarion’s touch once more. The soft, wet pop of the vial cork made him tense in anticipation. He had fucked other men here and there over the years, but he had not received one since his youth, before he himself was fully reckoned a man.

Hilarion’s slickened hand back on his buttocks felt good, warm, lascivious. A shudder of pleasure went through him, but it did not dispel the tension in his shoulders, his hips, the small of his back.

“Have you—” Hilarion let the question hang in the air.

Alexios took a deep breath. “I have, but not in many years.”

Slippery fingers travelled up and down the cleft of his arse, pressing inward, parting his buttocks. “You remember, do you not, that it is more enjoyable if you are at your ease?”

“I do remember,” Alexios said softly. He inhaled deeply again and let the breath out, trying to focus on nothing but how good everything felt, his briskly scraped skin and the hot sun on it and the wet green scent of the reeds under his nose and the warm, slow caresses of the man he had wanted in his bed for years.

Hilarion’s quiet voice, again in command, again thick with honey. “We are in no hurry. There is oil a-plenty. When I fuck you, you will be more than ready for me.”

Alexios caught his breath, then caught it again as a slick fingertip circled his opening lazily, teasingly, round and round. Of a sudden all he could think of was how much he wanted more, wanted those fingertips and the whole fingers and more than that inside him. Above him he could hear Hilarion’s breathing growing ragged again. His cock felt like a rod of iron trapped between his belly and the earth.

At last, after so, so long, the fingertip and another one insinuated themselves just inside him. They pulled back fractionally, then slid forward again further, just a little more than before. Again, the infinitesimal retreat, the tiny, tiny advance. So good; so maddening.

Hilarion made good his promise. Alexios had already lost track of time; even the short summer shadows they cast on the bank no longer held meaning for him. Before long, it seemed the world was not and never had been anything but himself belly-down, arse in the air, and Hilarion’s fingers working him open, slowly and inexorably. The fingers abandoned him only for Hilarion to slicken them anew, and warm droplets of oil ran down Alexios’s arse-cleft to fall against his stones and his inner thighs.

At some point he knew there were three fingers inside him, and he felt them curl against the little knot of nerves deep within him. Sparks shot through his loins, and his cock felt as though, somehow, Hilarion were caressing it from deep inside. He was moaning abjectly, face buried in his forearm, arse not only raised but now thrusting against Hilarion’s hand. And then he was empty, oh, so empty—

“Up, Alexios. On your hands and knees,” came the growl, ferocious and sweet.

He was still moaning slightly, whimpering a little, as he obeyed. A shifting sound, then hands gripping his hips, pulling him into place, _his_ place, beneath Hilarion’s lean hard body. Then a hand at his arse again, opening him up—

Short, rough breaths burned on Alexios’s nape; fingers dug into his hips again. Then teeth scraped hard down his right shoulder-blade, finishing with a sharp nip where the bone ended. Alexios yelped, feeling himself spasm round the cock distending him in the same painfully pleasant way, feeling his own cock surge fiercely beneath him.

He had not thought of the words of his very first lover, so long ago, in many years; he had had no need to. But now he heard them in his mind: _Resist me, Alexios. Push outward against me._ And without thought he obeyed, as if he were still a doe-eyed youth in the arms of a battle-hardened Atrebas twice his age. He let the inner muscle slacken, then pushed backward, and Hilarion slid into him to the hilt.

“Oh, gods. Oh, Alexios. _Oh._ ” 

He had never before heard Hilarion’s voice so low, so deep, so stunned with pleasure. The weight against his back and thighs shifted as Hilarion began to thrust, slowly and gently. The rhythm came back to him, as surely as his long-ago lover’s voice. He felt himself tighten round the thick, hard, oiled flesh that had replaced Hilarion’s fingers, then softening once more, blossoming outward; heard Hilarion moan again, voice slipping from Latin into British into no language at all.

Hilarion still clutched Alexios’s right hip for purchase as he thrust. His left hand wandered all over Alexios’s body: feathery caresses at his nape that made Alexios shiver, tweaks of his nipples between fingertips until he yelped again, palms smoothing over his hips and outer thighs, fingers teasingly feinting inward. Alexios had been thrusting upward to meet Hilarion’s strokes, but now he felt his hips jerk forward and down, desperate for Hilarion to move his hand inward, just a few inches—

And then he gasped loudly as that same hand abandoned his thigh to make a fist in his hair and yank his head backward. The pain was sharp and intimate and shocking, like Hilarion’s teeth in his skin. Hilarion was arched over him and buried in him to the hilt, no longer thrusting. Fresh blood rushed into Alexios’s cock, bringing it to a painful degree of hardness; he could feel wetness at the tip. He groaned.

“Oh, _no._ ” The voice at his ear, rough and deep and fierce and without a note of its customary mockery, might indeed have belonged to a wolf and not a man. “No. You have given yourself over to me this afternoon, remember? You are mine. I will touch you as _I_ please, not as _you_ please. Do you understand me, Alexios?”

“I—I do,” Alexios breathed.

“Good.” His earlobe was swallowed up in sucking wet warmth, then released with a hard nip to its bottom edge. He whimpered, and he heard a low, dark chuckle in return.

Hilarion drew himself nearly all the way out of Alexios, then plunged sharply into him once more, making Alexios’s breath catch in his throat. His hand had dropped from Alexios’s hair and resumed its intimate explorations. Alexios let himself thrust upward and back against Hilarion, who had seemed to welcome it before, but when the questing fingertips brushed lightly over his inner thigh, he held his lower body rigid, though it caused tremours to wash downward from his hips into his legs.

“Oh, you are so good,” Hilarion whispered. He had begun to thrust harder and faster, and his voice had begun to ripple with the tension of imminent climax. “So good for me, holding yourself back… But what if I were to touch you of a sudden, Alexios? How long would you last, with my hand—”

The hand in question, its palm slick with oil, stopped teasing the hollow behind Alexios’s left knee and curled decisively and warmly about his cock.

“—there?”

The answer was, not very long at all.

Even with Hilarion’s fingers not moving on him, Alexios could feel the dam within him start to buckle, the pull in his blood toward the inexorable. Every thrust into him was a deep caress; every stroke of Hilarion’s cock against the little nexus of pleasure deep inside him made his own cock pulse within Hilarion’s tight, warm, slick grip. And then he felt Hilarion’s hand move, the knowing fingertips slipping against that same spot, just under the head—

The dam broke. Alexios could no longer hold still; he thrust hard against Hilarion’s palm. Even before the second thrust he began to spurt, groaning and shuddering heavily, his seed covering Hilarion’s hand, drops of it striking his own chest and belly. Just as his climax leached the last of it from him, he heard a triumphant cry, he felt fingers dig into his hips, a paroxysm of trembling behind him, a wet warmth filling him.

Alexios collapsed against the reeds, expecting Hilarion’s damp panting weight atop him. But, instead, strong hands pulled him against a hard chest that glistened with clean sweat, the heart beneath the freckled skin throbbing hard against his ear. He turned slightly so he could encircle Hilarion with his own arms, and their mouths joined again, a kiss that began in ferocity and eased into a soft, sweet lassitude.

Before long the heat persuaded them to move slightly apart, but for a while longer they lay quietly in the damp reeds, idly and lightly caressing one another. They began again to perceive the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the gentle murmur of the river. A breeze came up, setting the leaves to whispering and stirring the air pleasantly against moist overheated skin.

When Hilarion eventually spoke, his voice was slow and soft.

“You realise,” he said at Alexios’s ear, “that when I said, ‘You are mine,’ that was not merely lust speaking.” A pause. “Do you not?”

The languour suffusing Alexios made the forming and uttering of words seem an onerous task. But he did not wish to cause Hilarion anxiety by keeping his peace. He said, as softly, “I do. And it was not merely lust that answered it.”

His reward was an unguarded smile, no mockery in it, and a fond kind of softness in the light-coloured eyes as Hilarion’s fingers played against his cheek. Alexios smiled back, buoyed by a lightness he had not felt in years — perhaps all his life — while, at the same time, anchored and steadied.

At length, Hilarion said with a note of regret, “The shadows have begun to lengthen.”

Reluctantly, Alexios got his feet under him and stood. It was still quite warm, and he was once more slick with sweat. He regarded the blue Mosella wistfully, but whether they dived into it again or not they would be drenched anew by the time they made Castra Cugerna. Better to set out now and visit the bath-house later.

Hilarion stood, too, and whistled three sharp notes that echoed over the water and the trees on either side. Shortly thereafter they heard a rustling of underbrush and the snapping of twigs, and then the hounds bounded up to them, tails furious blurs and tongues lolling. Hilarion bent slightly to ruffle their fur, a hand on the back of each dog, and spoke softly to them.

They gathered their clothes and boots from the reeds and donned them. “Pack the oil and strigils,” Alexios said. “I will see to the the horses.”

“Yes, Alexi—sir,” Hilarion said. There was no mockery in his tone, but Alexios knew him well enough to look up into his face and catch the quirk of his lips and the glint in his eyes.

“I am quite up to… reassuming my burden at this juncture,” Alexios said drily.

“As you will, sir. When you wish to set it down again, I pray you will let me know?”

“It is entirely possible you may know it before I do.”

Something in Hilarion’s eyes shifted. The change was subtle, but for Alexios an image came to mind of a great fire, banked.

“Indeed I may, sir,” Hilarion said. The words shimmered on the air, thick with promise. Then he stooped again to retrieve the bathing implements, as graceful clad as he had been naked. Alexios gave himself the briefest of moments to admire the movement, to note the sunlight streaking his centenarius’s hair and gilding the freckles on the arches of his cheekbones, before turning toward the ancient oak in whose shade the horses stood.

**Author's Note:**

> While I can't really say that dom!Hilarion/sub!Alexios is my headcanon for that pairing — they strike me as complete equals, except for formal rank — I thought it would be an interesting story to write.
> 
> Many thanks to [Opalmatrix](http://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/pseuds/opalmatrix) for her excellent beta work on this story, especially the nature details. I borrowed the name and location of the fictional "Castra Cugerna" from her lovely Alexios/Hilarion fic ["He Who Waits."](http://archiveofourown.org/works/298668) Everything else in this story is my creation.


End file.
